Creative Writing with the Crimson League

October 12, 2023

Thankful Thursday: thankful for Amazon “ratings”

Any indie author could tell you that reviews and ratings are different things on Amazon. Amazon will allow you to leave a 1-5 star rating for a product or book without leaving a review along with it. Well, since the free promotion I ran for my birthday, I’ve had two new ratings without review populate.…

October 11, 2023

How much world building is worth it?

As a writer of fantasy, this is an important question to ask. The answer will vary from series to series and writer to writer. The answer, I think, largely depends upon what your focus is. Tolkien wanted to create a large, lasting mythology. As a result, his entire corpus is world building in a very…

October 10, 2023

Don’t expect any pattern, rhyme, or reason to blog stats

Today I wanted to discuss blog stats and how I’ve made peace with them making no sense. If you blog, and your experience blogging is anything like mine, you will feel like there is no rhyme or reason to your blog stats: the numbers of hits in particular. Posts I don’t expect to do well…

October 9, 2023

“The Once and Future King” and Sir Gawain

One thing you may not know about me is that Arthurian Legend is one of my borderline obsessions. (They are ALL British, though I’m American. But that’s another story.) T. H. White’s The Once and Future King is one of my favorite books of all time. It taught me how to introduce deep themes of…

October 8, 2023

Sunday Reflection: guard your thoughts

St. Paul tells us in today’s second reading at Mass, “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” (Philippians 4) In another letter, St.…

October 7, 2023

What they don’t tell you when you start writing

They don’t tell you, when you start writing fiction, that your own characters will almost certainly break your heart. That you might well cry revising your own story, overwhelmed by what is happening to your characters (especially if you let it sit as long as you should before going back to revise). They don’t tell…

October 6, 2023

On prologues and epilogues

Some readers love them. Some hate them. Prologues and epilogues are the topic today! I don’t happen to mind them, but I could generally do without them. I mean, as long as the story is complete without them, I don’t miss them or wish they were there. I feel a novel should have a prologue…

October 5, 2023

Thankful Thursday: grateful for my growth as a writer over ten years

It’s a crazy thing, publishing a trilogy, never doing much marketing on it and taking it all down, and ten years later, going back to it to make a professional go of it. It’s amazing to see the change in quality from first edition to second, given time, greater experience, and feedback from my editor…

October 4, 2023

A story of three families

One of my favorite ways to think about my Herezoth trilogy is as the story of three families. You are introduced to each of these families in book one, largely through a pair of siblings (Kora and Zac, Menikas and Lanokas, Zalski Forzythe’s family). Sibling relationships, for some reason, are very influential and important in…

October 3, 2023

My toxic writer trait: my vocabulary

My toxic writer trait is my vocabulary, and possibly not in the sense you think. It’s rather expansive. This isn’t good or bad, it’s just a result of my particular interests and background. I’ve always been a VORACIOUS reader, I have a particular affinity for the 16-19th centuries, I have studied multiple languages in grad…